Followup, The Secret to Success in Affiliate Marketing by Robert Thompson

Followup, The Secret to Success in Affiliate Marketing by Robert Thompson

Followup, The Secret to Success in Affiliate Marketing

Whether promoting SFI, Goji, Amway or any other Affiliate Marketing program, it seems that I always hear the same complaints from other affiliates in those programs.

"I never hear from my downline!" or "No matter how many times I write, My downline affiliates never seem to get involved." In fact, this is very common throughout the affiliate marketing industry. In most cases it takes as many as 100 new affiliates to gain one who is active and will actually take action to build a business.

This is totally unacceptable, and avoidable if you use proper followup techniques. In fact, the one in one hundred ratio can be improved dramatically by using a solid followup plan. The plan included in this article has four parts that if followed, will cause your affiliate marketing results to skyrocket.

Get Your Reader's Attention

What I mean by this, is that you need to get them to actually read what you have to say. Those interested in a business opportunity usually sign up for several different programs. Each of these programs is competing for the readers attention, and as a result, your messages can easily be lost in the clutter.

What is needed is a way to make your messages stand out from the crowd. Snappy headlines help, but to really get a reader's attention, try using Ecards in your followup program. Ecards have a couple of advantages that can ignite your followup campaign. First, everybody likes getting a greeting card and when they see a notice in their in box that someone has sent them a card, their natural curiosity gets the best of them, and they open the card. Second, most Ecard providers provide a tracking service that notifies you when a card has been opened. This allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your followup campaign.

Here are a couple of hints that will definitely help you in the use of Ecards. First, limit the use of these cards to special occasions. Your
initial introduction, and a congratulatory message upon completion of a training event should do the job. Do not over use them, or Ecards
can become ineffective. Second, keep your messages short and sweet. The idea is to get your reader used to dealing with you. After a couple of contacts, they will be more likely to look for your Email address on normal correspondence.

Ecards are available from a variety of sources and are usually provided for free by the major Internet Service Providers. You can also purchase custom cards for a smalll fee from companies like Hallmark.

Write a Newsletter

Getting responses from your downline affiliates is all about building trust and your initial contact is only the beginning. In order to develop this
trust, follow up on a regular basis with a newsletter to your entire organization. Make your newsletter fun and upbeat. Include a useful article or two, and a couple of references to useful tools. Also, if one of your affiliates achieves a milestone, for instance Top 100 placement, mention it in your letter with a congratulation and a nice reward. Spend some money for a co-op share for them, or send them a free Ebook.

"But I only have a couple of affiliates right now" you say.

It doesn't matter if you have two or two thousand affiliates in your downline. The effects are the same. By sending out a newsletter to your
affiliates, you will generate interest, establish yourself as a leader, and as someone who cares about your team members. This goes a long
way toward establishing trust and fostering teamwork.

Special Announcements

Special Announcements are the next step in building trust, and generating activity within your afiliate team. If you discover a really exciting tool, or maybe an intriguing post on business forum that will be useful to your affiliates, make a special announcement to your team. This may not light a fire under every member of your team, but it only takes one or two folks to become active to really change the dynamics of your entire organization.

Delivering Your Messages

Most affiliate programs provide a simple autoresponder which allows you to send group messages. Most of these only have the capability of sending text messages, but to send your newsletters and announcements, they can be extremely effective. If you want to really get your teams attention, try using one of the many commercially available autoresponders on the market today. These will allow you to set up and deliver not only text pages, but HTML documents as well. For those of you who aren't familiar with this, an HTML newsletter looks like a miniature Webpage, complete with color, banners and hyperlinks. This is a great way to give a little bit of pizzazz to your written communications.

Keep in mind, that you can send newsletters and special announcements to your team, even if your team only has a few members. By properly wording your messages, you can create the illusion that you are leading a very large organization. This lends credibility to your efforts, and your response rate will improve.

Continue to Refine your Messages

Look for words and phrases that have a tendency to "tell people what to do" and replace them with "suggestions and recommendations." Nobody likes to be told what to do, and when it happens, the natural reaction is to rebel, or worse yet, to ignore your message. When this happens, you risk losing your affiliate forever.

Enlist the Support of Others

When you finally do get a couple of interested and active affiliates, involve them in your daily activities. There are two immediate benefits to
doing this. First, you will build a relationship that benefits both of you, because both have unique qualities to contribute to the business relationship. For instance, their talents can be exploited in the areas of editing and proofreading. Second, you will be able to train your affiliate on how to proceed in their business. You will be able to pass on key knowledge as to what has worked for you, and what to avoid.

Remember, if you are getting a lousy response to your followup efforts, chances are that you only need to refine what you are doing. Use Ecards to get a reader's attention. Keep your messages short and simple. Be sincere. Build trust among your team members with newsletters and special announcements. Continually refine your messages, and enlist the support of others on your team.

By following this short lesson, you should see a dramatic improvement in your response rate, and a corresponding increase in your
commission checks. : )




About the Author
Robert Thompson is retired from the United States Air Force. He has operated several successful businesses. He is a Team Leader with SFI and helps others to create wealth from the comfort of their homes. To find out how you can share in the multi-billion dollar home business industry, visit http://stay-home-and-earn.com For a free copy of the Stay at Home Jobs Newsletter, send a blank Email to News@badbobrst.par32.com

Two Quick Ways to Make Your Copy of Merchant's Data Feed Different From All Other Affiliates by Konstantin Goudkov

Two Quick Ways to Make Your Copy of Merchant's Data Feed Different From All Other Affiliates by Konstantin Goudkov

Product data feeds are really popular among affiliates because they can help produce thousands of product pages quickly and easily. Such pages can be used to drive highly targeted search engine traffic looking specifically for those products. But there is a big problem.

The problem with data feeds is the fact that a lot of affiliates use the same copies of feeds in the same exact ways. Most data feed affiliates put just the product names in HTML titles, so they all end up with a bunch of similar pages that have identical titles. And since the search engines give a lot of weight to the titles of HTML pages, those affiliates end up competing with each other for the same highly specific keywords.

Luckily, this problem has a quick and dirty solution. It's worse than going over the feed by hand, but much better than doing nothing. What I get from affiliates is that manually modifying feed simply defeats the purpose. But being able to do it automatically can help one differentiate his site from other affiliates without losing the benefits of using data feeds.

There are two basic ways to automatically make your site a little bit different from other affiliates of the same merchant.

The first way is to add some keywords before and/or after the product name in the HTML title. For example, let's say you pick a phrase "On Sale" to add after the product name. So instead of "Blue Widget #MN-3143" you have in the original data feed, you would now have "Blue Widget #MN-3143 On Sale" in the HTML title of that product page. You simply add that phrase to the titles of all products in the feed. That lets you specifically target people who would search for "blue widget on sale" or "mn-3143 on sale."

You can also use some arbitrary keywords like "Cheap" or "Discounted" or "Quality" before the product name to have something like "Cheap Blue Widget #MN-3143." The keywords you pick largely depend on the merchant's product line.

Another variation of this technique is to randomize the keywords that are displayed before and after product names in the titles. You can use a sever-side technology of your choice to pick a random keyword out of some predefined list and append it to the name of a product to form the title for the page. Your scripts would pick a new keyword for each request for the product page. Of course, that would only work if you are using a database, and do not generate static HTML using Webmerge or a similar program. That way, even though you don't control the exact keyword that is displayed for any particular page, with enough product pages you can cover a wider market of people searching with different modifiers. You should be able to cover different shopper types -- the ones looking for bargains as well as the ones looking for quality.

The second way to make your site different from others is a bit more complex, but could yield much greater results. Instead of adding something to the product names, you can try changing the names on a large scale. As I said earlier, modifying feeds by hand would defeat the purpose of using them. But if you perform a find-and-replace operation on the whole file then you can get different content without spending much additional time.

The utility you might want to use for feed modification is called sed. You can search for that name using you favorite search engine. It's sed -- the stream editor. I'm going to skip much of the technical detail on how and why it does certain things in a certain way. Instead, I will concentrate on describing practical application of sed with product feeds.

At its core, sed takes input data, modifies it according to certain rules and outputs the result -- all done line-by-line. It uses regular expressions and can perform extremely complex operations, by for now I just want to concentrate on simple replacements.

The good thing about sed is it can use an external file with multiple commands and execute them one after another for the entire input file (in our case, it's a product feed). So you can replace as many words as you need. Also, once you define those commands, you can use them for many different feeds with different merchants.

Let's go over a few examples that should illustrate the true power of this approach.

I'll assume that the merchant we are working with sells widgets of various kinds. You looked over the feed and saw that the merchant has some porcelain widgets; red and blue, large and small. One of the synonyms for porcelain is ceramic, so first thing you would do is replace the word porcelain with ceramic in all product names and descriptions.

This can be done by adding the following commands to a sed script file before running it against the feed:

s/porcelain/ceramic/g
s/Porcelain/Ceramic/g

Those commands will replace your keywords while preserving capitalization. So that a title like "Big Blue Porcelain Widget" becomes "Big Blue Ceramic Widget."

To make things more interesting, let's assume that the feed already has some ceramic widgets aside from the porcelain ones. So you do not want to end up with just one kind. Instead, you want to switch them around. Remember, your goal is to be as different from the original feed as possible.

You can achieve that with the following set of commands:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/ceramic/porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g

In the example above, I used MYTEMPKEYWORD as a place-holder. That let us make sure that we are not losing the original keywords.

What happens there is:

all "porcelain" is changed to "MYTEMPKEYWORD'
then
all "ceramic" is changed to "porcelain"
then
all "MYTEMPKEYWORD" (which used to be the original porcelain) is changed to "ceramic"

and then the same thing should be done for all capitalized keywords.

You can use anything in place of MYTEMPKEYWORD as long as it does not already appear in the feed. You want to use some unique keyword.

Once you are done with those keywords, you can change something like "Metallic" to "Shiny Metal Finish" -- assuming that makes sense for a given product line.

Adding that to a command file would give you:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/ceramic/porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g
s/Porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/Ceramic/Porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/Ceramic/g
s/Metallic/Shiny Metal Finish/g
s/metallic/shiny metal finish/g

That would also change "Blue Metallic Widget" to "Blue Metal-Looking Finish Widget."

As I said earlier, you can add as many commands as you want for different words and phrases. And with enough such small changes, you will be able to reach traffic that is not already covered by your competing affiliates. While a few hundred affiliates with their data feed sites might be displayed for a keyword "blue porcelain widget" -- there might be just a few (if any) covering "blue ceramic widget" for the same merchant.

Even something like

s/TV Set/Television Set/g

along with diagonal sizes and brand names might help you stand apart from the rest of the affiliates who use the same feed. Any change is better than having the same exact content as others.

I encourage you to download a copy of sed and check it out. Once you get a hang of it, you will be able to automate the whole process. And if you are already using scripts to refresh merchants' feeds and rebuild sites automatically, then you can plug sed in the middle and modify feeds on the fly.

Also, if you are having a hard time coming up with words to replace, you might want to check out Princeton's WordNet. You can even download the word database and use it locally on your desktop.


About the Author
Konstantin Goudkov manages an affiliate program with a merchant
that carries 2500+ gifts. If you enjoy working with companies
that treat affiliates like valued partners then be sure to
check us out.

You can find more information about our program at:
http://www.genericgifts.com/affiliate_program.jsp